Random postapocalyptic ... okay, hyperbolic ... eh. Wev.

Why not? It's been a while, but since I've forgotten why I stopped maintaining this blog, if I ever had a reason, I might as well get at it again. I can't come up with a very good reason I might have quit blogging at the time I did, other than I was working on my bachelor's degree and working full-time at that point, and it may be that I decided there was just too much outside stuff that required attention.

S'anyway ... here's what's on my iTunes (10 random, comments if there are any):

1
You're So Vain -- Carly Simon
Admittedly, I never really knew any dudes who were this kind of narcissist. She's played it coy about who the song was written about, though I've always found it easy to believe it was about Warren Beatty. The apricot scarf was the giveaway -- Mick Jagger was another one the rumor went around about, and I can't see it. Okay, I don't want to see it -- it kind of makes me feel like I have a cat hair on the back of my tongue, thinking about Mick wearing a scarf, or anything in apricot. Not only that, but Mick Jagger is vain, and I can't imagine he'd have agreed to sing the backing vocals on such a vicious song that he knew to be written about him. At least we know it wasn't about James Taylor -- vain is about the last thing I think of when I think of him. If James Taylor was vain, he'd have started wearing a hat when he was about 36 and would still have it on right now. Maybe the song is actualy about Jerry Brown -- he used to run with a fairly high culture bunch. Hell, he had a years-long affair with Linda Ronstadt and never married her. It's the wrong era to be about Slick Willie Clinton, or I'd buy that it was about him -- it reminds me of him. Ew, no -- I can't figure him in an apricot scarf either ...

2
Scandinavian Ladies -- Holly Palmer
I'll admit as much as I always enjoyed this album (Oxblood 2x4), I have no freaking clue what this song is supposed to mean. I get some of the other ones, but this one is just opaque. I'm sure that's what she meant. Holly Palmer was a hipster before anybody knew what one was. But I wouldn't have bought the disc if she couldn't sing -- I hate*hate*HATE chick singers who don't know how to work dynamics and vibrato. Okay, that means Holly Palmer ain't no hipster -- she knows how to sing and does it. Hipster chick singers either know how and don't or don't know how. Go run "Pomplamoose" on Youtube and try to sit through any single vid. She sings like she doesn't care, which gives me the goo -- Holly, at least, sounds like she gives a shit what she sounds like, and like she gives a shit about her material.

3
You Should Never Have Opened That Door -- Ramones
Okay -- obscure Ramones I've never paid a damn bit of attention to as a single song. It's hard to say anything about the Ramones and not sound either idiotic or pretentious. I'm neither, so I'm just gonna sniff some glue. At least it's short.

4
Midnite Cruiser -- Steely Dan
This is one of two-score or so songs I have in my iTunes library that I like a hell of a lot when I hear it, and I remember hearing it on the intentionally obscure album rock radio station I listened to when I was in high school and loving it back then, but when it's over I completely forget it for, oh, say ten years. Steely Dan amnesia -- I'm gonna call that a GenX disease. I know there's so many of us out here whose music listening habits were developed at the cusp of the death of commercial terrestrial radio, at the cusp of the death of album rock, at the cusp of the death of the music-biz-as-it-was (hallelu it didn't take Steely Dan along, they've managed to keep moving), who have songs like this stuck in their heads like old trees on old roads in places they haven't been in twenty years, but they know them immediately and kinetically when they go past at sixty miles an hour on the way somewhere they haven't been in a decade and didn't really want to go but feel obligated.

5
Divine Intervention -- Matthew Sweet
I love Matthew Sweet's composition and arranging. I love his guitar playing. I generally really like his lyrics and his backing vocals. The only album I've liked him well throughout as a lead singer is 'Altered Beast' because it's pretty much the only set he ever released where he actually sounded like he gave a fat shit what it sounded like when he sang it, or if it sounded like he cared a bit. What I'm saying, here, is Matthew Sweet often sounds like he couldn't care less -- he allows no dynamics to come through in his vocals. This one is from 'Girlfriend,' and there are two or three on it that are like this. I guess sometime after whatever life crisis precipitated 'Altered Beast,' he kind of lost his ability to sound like he cared what his vocals sounded like. The ones on 'Girlfriend' and 'Altered Beast' are nice, and the backing vocals are nicely arranged. I love power pop, and I love layered, wall of Splenda backing vocals, so those two albums are kind of ideal for me -- but I can't honestly say I wouldn't be happy enough to hear somebody else sing the lead vocals on everything else after 'Beast' I've heard from him. You don't even know who Matthew Sweet is, do you?

6
This Heart That You Own -- Dwight Yoakam
That's an old one. One of the few "country" artists I ever could stand to listen to. That dude can belt. Of course, it ain't like he's from New Orleans or somewhere -- SOB's from Columbus, Ohio. Not that the rust belt ain't got it's cred as far as life sucking. I live in it, I grew up in it, I can tell you that's probably why I like Dwight -- his view of pain isn't too hard for me to get to. I can't remember if he did a video for this one, but I do recall him being one of the first quasi-country musicians to do videos, and the ones he did early on were pretty entertaining. They had a sort of Magritte quality to them -- I'm gonna have to guess the one I remember was probably for It Only Hurts Me When I Cry with the Quebecois-looking mime in it vogueing as he got in and out of cabs and standing on top of urban high-rises.

7
Geraldine and John -- Joe Jackson
What the hell happened to Joe Jackson? I mean what the hell happened to the Joe Jackson who did songs like Geraldine and John, of course. "They are married but of course not to each other" was the line that stuck in my head for nearly thirty years and sent me to Amazon, finally, for the tune. But Steppin' Out was the immediate cliffside falloff of my interest in anything he had to do. It wasn't that bad, it was just out of range, for me -- I like stuff that qualifies within a fairly broad but well-defined definition of 'power pop,' and after that album, Jackson stopped performing it. Saw him on a double-bill with Todd Rundgren (who never quit doing at least some power pop, and still does it) about a decade ago, he went back and revisited some of the old material -- he still sounds great, though he doesn't look like life's been very good to him, IYKWIMAITYD.

8
Battle Scar -- Max Webster/Rush
Eh. I love a lot of the Max Webster material. There's a handful of Rush songs that don't make me want to tickle my uvula and barf. This one is such an uneasy mishmash of lyrics ... okay, musically it ain't that bad. It's about how shitty the US treated Native American Indians -- I can't disagree with the expressed sentiment. I can't stand about 80% of the lyrics the Randian Neil Peart has a hand in -- that's my problem. There's an old hippie in here somewhere who can't stand anything that makes excuses for selfishness. Oh, and as much as I actually like a lot of Alex Lifeson's guitar playing, Kim's a more disciplined and tasteful lead player, hands down. So there's that. I also resent the fact this is one of the few things that got Kim Mitchell played on US commercial FM radio when, compared to most of the Max Webster and a huge proportion of his solo work, it's lame. It doesn't suck, but it's lame compared to 'Akimbo Alogo' or 'Rockland.' Oops -- caught me! Yeah, Expedition Sailor, that's right...

Nice heavy-metal-band ending, BTW.

9
Up Around The Bend -- Creedence Clearwater Revival
Okay, now I'm just showing off how diverse and broad my iTunes library is. But legitimately I have loved CCR since I was too young to go to a show. My older sister had a copy of Bad Moon Rising and Lodi that I used to listen to repeatedly. I have seen John Fogerty live in one of those round-robin multi-artist concerts in the past few years. Unlike a few artists we've seen in that setting, Fogerty can still sing like a bastard and play the guitar. I thought of this song a lot when we made our pilgrimate to Portland a few years ago from the Midwest. It makes me think of that, for some reason ...

10
The Night The Carousel Burnt Down -- Todd Rundgren
Oh, hell -- was hoping for a big finish, but instead it's in my bottom 20 of Todd songs. I love Todd, don't get me wrong -- but this one falls at the top of my least favorites because it's shtick, and most of the time I can smell the bullshit on Todd's shtick. When he's just 'blowing' (in the beat definition, I mean) he's one of the best rock musicians born in the US. When he's doing shtick, it's uneven at best -- this one isn't the worst, by far (I Looked In The Mirror is probably the worst, for the record, though there are other genuinely embarrassing ones out there), but there's so much genius on 'Something ... Anything?' this one is one of those three minute songs I usually let play when I listen to the album, but I'm anxiously waiting for Black Maria because it really kicks ass in a serious way. And this one doesn't. Kick ass. Or do anything in any way resembling serious. CF Saving Grace and Marlene. Maybe S...A? should have been a single album? I don't know. There seems to be more transitional dross on it than any of his other albums, and it was before the psychedelic drugs (which improved Todd immensely on an artistic level, to be painfully honest, but he probably thinks so too).

Okay -- enough quasi-random iTunes barf for tonight. This was fun -- maybe I'll start trying to do this every Friday evening again, like I did for a while five years ago. I need an outlet.

Somebody posted a comment on a five year old post

I had completely forgotten about this blog. I got an e-mail notifying me there was a comment, so I went ahead and approved it -- and I'll probably jump in here later, when I'm in my cups, and do another "random ten" post just because. Because it's been about five years and I have three times as many MP3s and why not?

Dang. It's been a long time.

As I've noted in the past (probably not here, but I have blogs you've never seen, y'know?), when I was a freshman in high school (somewhere back around the Pleistocene Era), I was assigned for one nine-weeks term, to write every day in a journal. When I started it, I wrote in it every day -- that lasted a couple of weeks. I sat down and did the week's worth of entries every Saturday after that, for at least three or four weeks. The day before the journal was due to be turned in, I did the remainder of the entries all in one evening. Nobody was the wiser.

The teacher of my freshman comp class confessed all she'd done was count the pages. She didn't read them, she just wanted to know that we'd done the exercise.

Web journals (this isn't, strictly, a blog -- I don't always link outside the entry, and I think that's the qualification) ain't any dogdamned different than my freshman comp assignment. There's nobody posting, commenting or grading me, so this goes on the back-back-back burner most of the time.

Since, by and large, this particular journal has been devoted to music I like, I'll relate a few anecdotes about the crazy perimenopausal music habits of someone who was born just a RCH after Kennedy died.

As of this date, I have 1,082 individual cuts in my 'big' ITunes library. I have a second, more focused pop directory that contains just shy of 400 songs. Once you get past the Todd Rundgren/Utopia and the Cheap Trick, most of the stuff I've paid for from ITunes rests in the pop directory. Largely, they're songs I remember hearing on the radio by people whose catalogs weren't ever worth buying -- some of them are one-hit wonders, some well-respected bands who only had a song or two that appealed to me.

In recent days, I've been fetishizing a song by a band from Detroit called 707. I was perfectly willing to pay for their lone hit song, I Could Be Good For You. In context, it's probably mostly a forgettable song, but it was 707's biggest hit. It's kind of like The Kings' Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide, I guess -- they were probably a killer band, but a combination of professional and promotional missteps, and the quasi-depression in the music biz in the era (the song was originally released on their eponymous first album in 1980) rendered them more or less a one-hit wonder. Oh, they actually had another semi-hit with a song called Megaforce, which sounds like some kind of jingoistic pro-military anthem that would have slid in handily in any soundtrack to any Tom (Xenu) Cruise movie from the era, and may have been, for all I know. It didn't hold a candle to I Could Be Good For You, I know that much.

Probably not, though, since a lot of soundtrack albums for jingoistic pro-military Tom Cruise movies are available on ITunes. I don't know where you can actually pay a nominal fee to download ICBGFY. You see, the first album is totally out of print. The re-release that was done somewhat later, which includes the first two albums, is not available on ITunes. I tried searching a couple of other download services, but no dice.

There's another song from that era, released in (I think) 1982, from a Chicago band called The Kind. The song was called I Got You. It was a great tune; a real power pop gem. I had the album, for a while -- it was called 'Pain And Pleasure,' and the song with that title was good, too -- but regrettably, I sold it in a leaner time, during my first marriage, when I was freakin' lucky to get the $2 I got for it (I'd only paid about $6 for it new, it was a cutout at some Midwestern record store or other). The Kind have, apparently, disappeared from anything even resembling the event horizon in pop/mainstream rock music.

Hey, do you suppose The Kind was a marijuana reference? I honestly don't know -- that wasn't one of the euphemisms we used for it back in the early '80s, where I come from, and though I ain't from Chi (and honestly wasn't much of a pothead), I am ostensibly from a Midwestern state. Who can say?

This bugs me. The songs by both these bands are as good as the ones from bands I was able to go to ITunes and download in thirty seconds, for less than $2. They're no more obscure than some of the other stuff I've booted down (legitimately) from ITunes.

Now, I was one of those 'tweener pop kidz who bought 45 RPM singles back in 'the day,' because I wasn't willing (and, as tight as money was in the early eighties, able) to pony up for an album by a band who might have got lucky with one single and everything else they did sucked bilge. On occasion I did pay for an album by a band that wasn't as good as the single (I'm looking at you, David Diamond -- The Kings didn't really ever surpass Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide), but for the most part, I got at least two good songs out of any album I bought at Camelot Music back then. Even Glass Moon managed to get both Smoker At 17 and their not too bad cover of Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill out of their one (doubtless disappointing) chance at stardom.

There was another single that floated in my head for months. Snatches, I mean -- lyrics, or a riff, they'd come back to me when I was drinking or on the edge of sleep, but I could not remember for the life of me who had recorded the song. This one almost hurt, because I bailed out on the band after the album the song was on, and was never sufficiently attached to them to buy anything much but a used vinyl copy of the first album. That's why after trolling lyrics on Google for freakin' ever, in a Napa-induced fit of inspiration one night I finally managed to shovel up the fact that the song I was looking for was Back Where You Belong, and the band who'd performed it was, of all people, Foreigner. It was from 'Double Vision,' an album I didn't deign to buy mostly because I was so freaking sick of the title single within mere weeks of the album's release, I couldn't have imagined wanting to own it.

There you go -- one of my fetish tunes wound up being a quasi-single (I had the luck in the early '80s of having been within the broadcast range of one of those small-market Midwestern radio experiences of hearing one of the dying FM-rock radio genre's best stations ever in existence, which would play off-approval singles) from one of the best known albums by one of the most universally known bands of all time. My sig other had never heard the song. I downloaded it (for the nominal $1.99 ITunes usually charges), and played it for him, and it was completely new to him. The SO being a year older by the skin of your teeth, it wasn't purely timing. The song just didn't get the exposure it deserved.

It's a bitchin' tune. So is the 707 song, but regrettably, it ain't available at ITunes. Neither is I Got You. And no, I'm not mistaking the artist on The Kind tune for Split Enz -- this is an entirely different snipe of a tune.

I guess at some point I'll have to break down and start haunting used record stores (or CD, since the re-release of 707's first and second albums is post-compact-disc-era). I will manage to insert that song in my uber-pop directory, by hook or by crook.

The Kind -- well, I don't hold on hope much for that one. The album was the only one they did, and it's out of print, and they didn't have a ginormous hit with either that or Pain And Pleasure, so that would be a worthless crusade.

I'm big on useful crusades, but useless ones? Nah.

Did I miss a linguistic paradigm shift?

A couple of years ago, I mean.

At what point did the word 'cornhole' cease to mean jamming something up one's anus and start to mean a game where people toss beanbags at a piece of plywood?

You're driving along in the Midwest, and you know people are pretty freaking warped, it's never been any secret ... but you see a sign on the side of the road, it looks like black shoe polish on cardboard.

It says 'CORNHOLE GAMES' with an arrow pointing back some forsaken, weed-lined road.

Expedition Sailor turned to Fellow Traveler and said, "that would have gotten somebody arrested when we were in high school, advertising anal sex like that. What's the world coming to?"

Apparently, it's worse than that -- cornhole is now the name of some dim recreational activity. It's probably supposed to be a replacement for horseshoes, since most of the hicks I grew up around couldn't play horseshoes without managing to maim themselves somehow. You should have seen them with Jarts. A beanbag and a piece of plywood are much safer for those with tertiary syphilis, there's no question.

I can't help it, though -- every time I see 'CORNHOLE GAMES' I wonder which time Mom and Dad and Billy and Johnny drive back some road and find Mongo standing at the end with a handful of tenpenny nails and no pants.

Oh, yes -- that will be a 'CORNHOLE GAME' to end all cornhole games.

No meese this time.

But I'm just going to quasi free associate, since I'm not doing the ITunes random xnumber of songs. Just blowing.

I was heading in to do a couple of hours of work today -- I go in on Friday or Saturday during non-official office hours to pick up slack and do things like move files and do cleaning that I really hate to do in $35 chinos I ordered from Land's End, that sort of thing. While I was driving in, Sirius played the Rolling Stones' Let's Spend The Night Together. I know, I know -- there's a lot of shit hung off that one. Ed Sullivan asked them not to sing 'let's spend the night together' (the title of the freaking song, mind you), and to sing 'let's spend some time together,' which they sort of pretended to do, and whatever.

This isn't about the lyrics to the song, so much. It's about that break in the middle. That snarky and yet quasi-reverent middle eight from the song that is both paean and parody of the Beach Boys.

No, really -- listen to it! Tell me it ain't!

I laughed my ass off when I heard that, in the car. I'd heard the song about a million times, over the years, but I'd never noticed that the Stones had actually hip-checked Brian Wilson. What a riot.

Another song from roughly that era that, when I realized what was going on, I damned near had to pull the car over to laugh is Flo & Eddie's So Happy Together. Okay, it's actually the Turtles. Still, I'd heard the song a blue million times when I was a kid, on the radio, and the real mechanics of the song hadn't ever hit me until about a dozen years ago. I was driving home from work and had the classic rock station on, and they played the song.

Everybody thought Every Breath You Take, the Police song off 'Synchronicity,' was a stalker song. You'd have thought it was the first stalker song ever written. Well, shit -- Screamin' Jay Hawkins wrote what may well have been the first rock and roll stalker song with I Put A Spell On You, and Every Breath You Take doesn't really give that one a run for its money in any credible way. It's a midtempo pop song with fairly laid-back lyrics, and only the 'big picture' of the song really gives you a taste of what an obsessive, potentially dangerous set of lyrics it is.

The Turtles did that one one better, though, I hate to tell Gordon. Happy Together doesn't even sound all that much like a compulsive stalker love song until you really pay attention to the mechanics of what's going on with the music behind the lyrics. The choruses are nice and sunny, 'I can't see me lovin' nobody but you for all my life,' you know the drill. It's the minor-key, partly-cloudy verses that made me want to pull over and pound on the headliner of whichever Toyota I was driving at the time. Happy Together is a stalker tune, honey -- listen to what's happening in the music behind the lyrics. When you see the 'Imagine me and you -- I do. I think about you day and night' lyrics set against the troubled, diminished/minor chords, it all makes sense.

Well, that and the fact that Flo & Eddie worked with Frank Zappa, and therefore anything that seems to be unalloyed sentiment must, therefore, be considered suspect. Not that Frank and Gail didn't manage to make a marriage work around the road life for a very long time, but Zappa was not the kind of guy to get all mired down in sentiment.

I'm with that. Sometimes, the best relationships consist of laughing at the most puerlie expressions of the things you're feeling. Sometimes, the laughing is the best of it, and if you can laugh at just about anything, that means you can talk about just about anything, too.

I don't know. It just seems like taking anything too seriously is asking for it.

TAFN

Brief intermission from music posts. A moose bit my sister.

Pun sort of intended. While the expedition partner and I share many of the same musical experiences, our movie literacy is pretty divergent. I grew up so far out in the boondocks, it was a real production to go anywhere to see a first-run movie before I was about eleven years old. The first first-run movie I remember seeing, in fact, was 'Star Wars' in 1977.

The other half lived nearer to movie theaters, growing up in the burbs, so he saw more movies. Not necessarily better ones, mind you, but more.

Off and on, we both get the bug to expose each other to movies we remember, whether good or bad, from years ago. The first time I tried this was not a raging success -- 'Dark Star' isn't the movie you want to offer as a waterline of your taste, y'know? I mean, it's a hoot. It's John Carpenter's first movie, after all, and it has hippies and aliens and suspense. Only problem is, if you don't smoke hash, the movie comes off as what it was -- a low budget science fiction camp epic about four personality impaired nerds stuck on a space ship for twenty years. With an alien who looks like a Hippity Hop or a giant version of one of the fungi we've seen in the yard the past couple of years, pressing up out of old tree stumps like a creepy dildo.

Anyway, the next serious recommendation was a little more satisfying -- 'The President's Analyst,' a James Coburn (rest in peace) vehicle that was a real howler in light of the current governmental paranoia and invasions of individual citizens' privacy. For some bizarre reason, I don't think people in the late sixties would have thought The Phone Company should be tapping their phones and listening in on even the aggregates of their conversations, or else this movie never would have been made. It certainly wouldn't have been as good a joke as it was in this movie, at least, if people genuinely had believed their conversations and behaviors were being pawed over by members of their government. Cult movie or not, it skimmed a zeitgeist that wasn't just paranoid UN-haters. Back then, everybody hated 'the government' and 'The Phone Company,' not just canaries in the coal mine.

Tonight, we watched 'Westworld,' which I'd recalled sucking a bit when I saw it, back in the late seventies. Sometimes, we mellow, and as we age we can find nuance in movies that we didn't find originally, or at least enough camp value to make them laughable.

'Westworld' still sucks.

When you spend the last fifteen minutes of a movie asking each other why Richard Benjamin's character doesn't do ... well, anything much but run around, the suck quotient rises so high you start yelling "grab a weapon, wouldja? Jeez! How many times does that bastard have to show up on your ass before you realize the last one didn't work?" ... it sucks.

So I've added 'A Boy And His Dog,' 'Omega Man,' 'Damnation Alley' (with the caveat that the movie kind of sucked) and 'THX 1138' to the list. If I must sit through bad early to mid seventies SF, it might as well at least be based on well-written original stories, however badly executed.

As much as I hate "Chuck-Chuck-Bo-Buck-Banana-Fana-Fo ... uh ... you'll have to get out," (bonus points to anybody who can pinpoint where I stole this routine) Heston, I'll credit that Omega Man was actually a pretty decent campy science fiction movie. Of course, so was 'Soylent Green,' if only for the interminable jokes about Soylent Green being people. It was even concept-checked by Steven Colbert's voiced character, Phil Ken Sebben, on 'Harvey Birdman,' only instead of Soylent Green it was the cafeteria's baba ghanoush. One of the reasons I actually cried real tears when Phil Hartman died -- that SNL sketch he did based on that scene was pure genius, one of the funniest things I ever saw on that show once the original cast all left to make progressively less successful movies, become some variety or other of assholes or die of drug overdoses. Or else be Bill Murray.

Footnote -- 'Westworld' can be dumped, steaming and sparking, squarely at the feet of global warming denier Michael Crichton, whose last worthwhile effort was, in my opinion, 'The Andromeda Strain.'

Though I never actually saw the movie all the way through, I also threw 'Rancho Deluxe' into the mix. It isn't science fiction, it's just Lebowski-type gooniness. Oh, yeah -- we'll probably rent 'The Big Lebowski' at some point in the near future, too. I'm sure we'll both kick ourselves for not having seen it years ago.

I hate seeing movies in the theater. You can't pause them to get up and piss, and for the most part, you can't have a glass of wine (or three, if the movie sucks, CF: Westworld) while you do so. I think I developed bizarre anxiety attacks when seeing movies while I was in a period of serious emotional turmoil, and I've never quite got over it. Sitting in a theater demands a really captivating movie, for me, or I start worrying about shit I can't do anything about and stop watching the movie.

Yeah, I'm a freak. I'm guessing the prior posts where I made arguments in favor of bands like Foreigner and Zebra (granted only for single songs by either of them) probably already convinced you, if you know who they are. I never really minded being a freak, for that matter -- what the hell kind of boring conformist makes a judgment like that, anyhow?

Exactly.

Hasta!

In addition to old, I am profligate.

And busy. Without going into sufficient personal detail to give much away, work got blowed up in a tsunami of chaos a couple of months ago, and everything's still staggering around. I went from doing twenty hours in four days a week to doing thirty-five hours in the same four days, and throwing in a couple of hours elsewhere to make full-time. And there still are weeks when there's work left on my freakin' desk.

I don't want to bitch about work here, though, I have other outlets for that. Work is about as far from arts and music as anything I can imagine, for that matter, and that was the original point of starting this particular outlet. Just briefly explaining to my nonexistent fan base why I ain't posted nuttin' in almost two months.

I suppose since it involves Todd, I should make a remark about the New Cars. All I've seen so far is the quasi-new single, "Not Tonight," on Leno. As someone remarked elsewhere, it reminded me greatly of Utopia minus Willie and Roger. I mean, it's half the old Cars and half Utopia. Not that I don't appreciate any chance I can get to see Kasim Sulton perform -- I even saw him when he was in the Blackhearts, backing up Joan Jett in 1990. Well, okay -- Cheap Trick also were on the bill, or the odds are we wouldn't have ponied up for the ticket price. I love Kaz, but I wouldn't have paid what we paid to see Kingdom Come and Joan Jett, without the added impetus of the Rockford gang.

My brudda's already bought tickets for the show they're scheduled to play in our neck of the woods. The significant other Expedition Sailor and I have not purchased said tickets yet, though I'm not sure if it's just pure inertia. The show will probably be great. Todd still can sing the paint off the side of a Chrysler. Kaz is a better bassist every time I see/hear him. And we actually found the motivation to purchase the entry fee for Dwight Yoakam. I've loved Todd's stuff for over twenty years.

Gofigger.

I don't know. I guess there's some rebellious part of me that says this whole New Cars detour is really just a way of bankrolling his Roth IRA so Michelle and the Toddclone don't starve when he's past earning a living. I don't mind that, don't get me wrong -- on a personal level, it's fine if Todd's trying to put the Harvard entry fees in the bank for his larva to go to college when Todd himself may or may not be around to earn it anymore. That's good, progressive thinkin' on the man's part, and I'm all for that kind of thinking on the part of breeders everywhere ... but I don't feel compelled to finance it anymore. I've bought most of what Todd's recorded and released under his name, over the years. I've liked at least two-thirds of it, which is as good or better than I can say for any other artist I ever "went catalog" over, including Cheap Trick.

It just smells funny.

I don't even feel good about admitting that. I worry I'm becoming judgmental in my old age, or at least quick to judge. At the same time, I don't see any freakin' reason I should buy something I have a feeling is going to be unsatisfying to me esthetically, or even go so far as to squick me out with its transparently commercial aspirations. I want to be wrong.

I SOOOOOO want to be wrong, you can't imagine.

And yet I'm really much more interested in the new songs the 'Mats are supposed to have on the album that's to be released shortly, here.

Don't get me wrong -- a Utopia reunion? Road trip to Toronto! Chicago! Whatever. I'd do that in a New York minute. But maybe, just maybe, it's the fact that I lost interested in The Cars not long after Candy, Oh! and I just don't give a fat shit anymore. There were perhaps three or four songs from that album on that I care if I ever hear again. I put the Cars in the same cultural niche, for my own tastes, as Foreigner. The early stuff they did that I liked, I really, really liked.
The rest of it just didn't reliably do it for me.

I love ya', Todd, and the same goes for Kaz, but I just don't know that I can justify the ticket price for my local venue to see you cover "Let The Good Times Roll." Especially when I don't know how long after that song was originally recorded I'd have paid the entry vig to see Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr play it.

Man, I feel like such an infidel. I just can't get my enthusiasm behind it at all.

I want a couple new 'Mats songs and a new Sloan album. Because somewhere between the two, I'm convinced that's where the agnostic's line on heaven lies. And heaven lies.

Fixing a hole

When I was a teenager in the late '70s and early '80s, relying fairly heavily on FM radio for new music, there was a DJ who did the evening shift on a formerly kickass rock station in Cincinnati (WEBN, which was originally owned by the Wood family, then Randy Michaels started Jacor with the money, which merged with Clear Channel, and now it sucks), named Frank Johnson, who used to call Cheap Trick 'the Sears Beatles.'

I can't really tell you whether it was intended for mocking, irony, left-handed praise ... they were from around Chicago, where the Sears Tower is, and they never pretended the British Invasion wasn't an enormous influence on their songwriting and sound, so mocking or not, it was appropriate. It would have been an enormous lie (kind of like Tori Amos claiming she never heard Kate Bush when she started doing ... well, stuff that sounded exactly like Kate Bush). The only thing that monicker leaves out is the fact that Cheap Trick also were the 'Sears' Move/ELO, Kinks, Badfinger, occasionally Who, and once in a while, at least live, Rolling Stones. Rick Nielsen is a more adept songwriter than to, more than occasionally, be guilty of outright pastiche -- perhaps on the Move/ELO covers. Otherwise, he (and, on occasion, Zander and Petersson) did a creditable job of playing starlings and borrowing the things they wanted to buff up a more Midwestern U.S. version of the stuff, but being fairly original otherwise.

I think I've mentioned before that my older sister, who was 'of age' to really get into British Invasion first-wave stuff like the Stones, Kinks and Beatles, used to play 45s all the time; that I learned the lyrics to I Wanna Hold Your Hand when I was still wearing diapers. There also were singles like the Stones' Get Off My Cloud and Satisfaction, the Kinks' Well Respected Man, and some of the lesser lights like Gerry and the Pacemakers' Ferry Cross The Mersey and Gary Lewis and the Playboys' This Diamond Ring. I think my favorite Beatles single was We Can Work It Out -- I still love that one.

My foundation in popular music, therefore, was BI power pop and the stuff that borrowed from it, to various degrees, down the line. I first heard Cheap Trick when the single for Voices went on the jukebox at the little lunch dive across from my small town high school, circa '79 or '80. That was after '...At Budokan,' and I'll be honest -- there isn't much on 'Budokan' I prefer to the studio versions. I'd already been through this with Peter Frampton, my first passionate attachment to something my sister didn't listen to a decade before I discovered it. When I started buying Frampton's earlier solo albums -- and after my sister married, I discovered my brother-in-law also liked Frampton and loaned me cassette copies, after which I scraped together my allowance to buy vinyl copies for myself -- I realized that unless you'd been to a concert, often live albums lacked something. In retrospect, thirty years later, they're like wanking -- a pale version of the excitement of actually seeing the band, and only useful if you've already seen them live and can use the live album to invoke memories of the show. I've seen Cheap Trick several times since then, though, and I still don't like 'Budokan' much. I even got to see Frampton a couple of summers ago, after thirty years of liking a lot of his stuff, and '...Comes Alive' still doesn't hold a candle, for me, to the 'Something's Happening' studio album.

Frampton doesn't really count as British Invasion, I guess -- he was a hair too late (no pun intended) to pass for British Invasion, and most of the projects he was in, including solo ones, really borrowed more from American garage rock, southern boogie rock and blues than British stuff. It's kind of funny, actually -- The Small Faces did one of the most quintessentially British pop singles ever, Itchycoo Park, but Steve Marriott was all southern boogie/blues when he put together Humble Pie. Wait -- Lowell George did a lot of British Invasion derivative stuff when he was recording as Lowell George and The Factory, too. I wonder if it's a virus?

British Invasion bands also often were influenced by American blues, though there's a lot more Buddy Holly than B.B. King in the Beatles and the Kinks than there was in Humble Pie or anything Frampton did later. I think Frampton qualifies more as a mainstream rock guy, really, at least post-Pie. The Beatles pulled in other American popular music influences than simply blues, though -- hell, Ringo even sang a cover of Buck Owens's Act Naturally, and I understand George Harrison also liked American roots music, beyond what came through in Buddy Holly's work. Harrison might have been the tertiary songwriter for the Beatles, overshadowed by McCartney and Lennon in sheer volume if not necessarily quality, but his guitar playing on the stuff carried his influences through their songs, presumably, even when he didn't write them. There are lots of power pop songs with chicken-picked solos in their catalog, in other words.

My next great passion for BI influenced power pop was Todd Rundgren. I heard a retrospective of his work on FM radio one night around the summer of 1983 (probably on a local public radio station, since for some reason WEBN never played him after 1976, nor did its sterling competition in that era, 96-Rock, a much better station than WEBN ever will be again). It was around the time 'The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect' came out, and I got a quick primer in his stuff in about an hour. There is no thinner gloss to place over British Invasion pastiche than the one Nazz put on it -- though the Chad-and-Jeremyesque Gonna Cry Today belies the fact that they, too wanted something more than to simply be a Beatles cover band. The Nazz version of Hello It's Me didn't hold a candle to Todd's re-recording of it on 'Something ... Anything?' but did mark at least an effort to wander beyond cadging Beatles guitar riffs and vocal production. Todd has said he wrote it in half an hour on the bus while touring. I don't know if it's true, but his life is pretty strange -- I can't imagine he has a lot of motivation to make that kind of shit up.

Don't even make me talk about Meridian Leeward.

Todd broke away from that whole esthetic, largely, when he released 'A Wizard - A True Star!' around '74, though. There's some Beatlesque stuff on it, but frankly it compares as much with Zappa and California psychedelic pop and early American progressive rock as much as anything British. Reputedly, between 'S...A?' and 'AWATS!' Todd experimented with psychedelic drugs for the first time. Whether this is true or apocryphal, there obviously was a conscious choice on his part to move away from the whole British pop thing, and into more edgy (bombastic?) territory.

The first Utopia project album was all stuff built on this same foundation -- prog rock, I mean. Fantastic settings, long internal dialogues with spiritual figureheads, that sort of thing. It wasn't until the Utopia project with John "Willie" Wilcox, Kasim Sulton and Roger Powell that Todd waded back into the 'borrowing from British pop' vault, and even then the first album from this era, 1977's 'RA,' sounds marginally more influenced by British Invasion pop but still is a progresive-style concept album based on quasi-archaic themes and has long disquisitions on ... well, something other than love and the pedestrian difficulties and poignancies of modern life. Granted, Hiroshima is more of a mainstream rock song than prog, though the closing line, 'don't you ever forget ... don't you ever fucking forget,' guaranteed even it wasn't going to get airplay on mainstream stations. Utopia generally didn't seem to be about that, though, even later on.

The return to more traditional pop songwriting didn't really flash with Utopia until 'Oops! Wrong Planet,' a quasi-concept album that contained the uber Utopia song (covered repeatedly, usually badly, by at least a half-dozen different artists; most notably England Dan and John Ford Coley), Love Is The Answer. Love In Action is probably the most effective song on the album, to be honest, and it hews to the traditional verse-chorus BI-pop song structure, though there is a dual-lead solo between Todd on guitar and Roger Powell on his home-brewed nerd-tech keyboard that kills me every time I hear it. It isn't so much Beatlesque as Wingsesque, though I won't accuse Todd of McCartney pastiche by this point in time and in their respective careers. Todd was out on the boards before the Beatles broke up, and I'm guessing anything he picked up along the way also was picked up by McCartney through the same channels, neither could reasonably be accused of nicking off the other.

In both cases, it amounted to pulling in good musicians from the pool and using them effectively. As far as I'm concerned, the best of McCartney's post-Beatles work was done with Denny Laine; some of the stuff Todd did that I like best was with this particular formation of Utopia.

Utopia largely hung it up in the late-80s, though there were a few new post-album tracks -- one of my favorites, Monument (a solid revisit of More Light from 'POV'), popping up on the Passport 'Trivia' anthology, and some later tracks on a Rhino collection of 'POV' and 'Oblivion' (this second anthology also includes Monument).

This was kind of a sad time for me, music-wise -- power pop was morphing into hair metal, much of which really didn't cut it for me. The best bands from that era -- I'll probably write about it later -- weren't very Beatles-influenced unless they did it ironically. Generally speaking, because there had been a depression in the music biz in the '80s, if one band had a hit there were ten bands within a month playing pastiches of pastiches of the New York Dolls and/or old Iggy Pop (cf. Poison, Motley Crue, etc.). Little that was done was even innovative ripoff -- most of it was blandly overproduced, slick ripoffs of another hair metal band's last hit, an enormous clusterfuck of bad 120-beats-a-minute guitar pop, or else you were stuck with speed-metal and Metallica (whose work I have never liked, but who were, at least, more original than most of their peers about it). The comedy wing of the hair metal revolution was where I hung out, and I'll probably write about it sometime.

Needless to say, I was happy when Seattle bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden took over the radio, even if I was only peripherally a fan of 'grunge' itself. While it was far removed from the Beatles, and most 'grunge' bands played the guitar solo way down (something that still hasn't much recovered, sadly), played flashy musicianship way down, and concentrated on lyrics and song structure more. If I have to give up guitar solos, at least please write decent lyrics. Say what you will about Kurt Cobain, he was a good lyricist -- and by that I mean he seemed to genuinely enjoy playing with words, and playing words off each other. Aesthetically, grunge was largely a distillation of Sonic Youth dynamics into the 'barbaric yawp' of disaffected suburbia.

Before I come off sounding totally clueless, I realize Soundgarden -- and, for that matter, Queensryche -- don't fit the grunge label. Both bands had acrobatic and adept lead singers, were highly guitar-oriented, and generally hewed to the traditional verse-chorus-solo structure of, say, Graham Bonnet-era Rainbow. They exceeded hair metal by writing songs that actually were polished and 'about something,' or at least about something other than watching women in G-strings spin around a pole at a strip club. Black Hole Sun ... wow. Jet City Woman. There were some good things to say about hard rock in that era after all -- too much to say here.

After Seattle realigned mainstream rock music, there was a general schism into sub-genres. You had what was essentially a revival of 'frat-rock' or 'mullet-rock' with bands like Blink-182, Linkin' Park, anything that qualified as 'rap-rock' really ... a resurgence of Beach Boys and British influenced singer-songwriter stuff (I'm defining genres more by market appeal than actual sound, here) like Barenaked Ladies and Elliott Smith (anything that, in retrospect, qualifies as 'adult alternative') ... 'No Depression' or 'y'allternative' bands like the Jayhawks and Ryan Adams's old band Whiskeytown (often played on the same stations as the 'adult alternative' stuff) ... a small punk resurgence that pretty much seems to consist, now, of Green Day ... and puppy-eyed 'emo' which, to my ear, sounds pretty much like grunge with the 'loud' dynamic removed.

The late '80s and early '90s in Great Britain saw a sea change, as well. While Seattle was changing the esthetic here in the States, shoegazer bands like Jesus & Mary Chain and the Cocteau Twins accomplished much the same evolution with British pop -- which was to say, de-emphasized flashy performance and guitar solos in favor of a more textural affect. One Canadian band that started out heavily influenced by this movement, but evolved (or devolved, depending on your take on British Invasion bands and bands influenced by British Invasion bands) beyond it was Halifax, Nova Scotia's Sloan.

Sloan haven't been especially successful, in sales terms in the States, possibly because they weren't (aren't, as far as I know) ever really determined to be 'international rock stars' if it meant tailoring their work to the market rather than working at what they felt they did best. Whether it's because they were incapable of change -- and I find it hard to believe, comparing 'Smeared' with 'Between the Bridges' that their moderately successful longevity is due to anything but unwillingness to surf trends -- or stubborn, they have a niche market among Canadian pop fans and Yanks who like third-generation British Invasion-influence-influenced bands that, apparently, is at least lucrative enough to keep them making albums and touring occasionally.

What makes Sloan a treasure chest for power pop fans who don't mind a band's being derivative is that while they vary in the volume of quality work, the band consists of four independent songwriters with very different influences and tastes. Chris Murphy (generally the bassist, though he can mash up a creditable Keith Moon impersonation on the drums on occasion) and Jay Ferguson (not 'Thunder Island/used to be in Spirit' Jay Ferguson) pull most from invasion-era British pop, like Badfinger, the Kinks and the Beatles; Patrick Pentland's influences seem more guitar-oriented, though like most guitarists who 'came up' in the era of Kurt Cobain (and being the band's biggest My Bloody Valentine/shoegaze fan), he seems shy to solo much or often; and who the hell knows what all Andrew Scott (multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, atavist) draws on. Most of his songs are in the lengthy, noisy progressive vein that brings to my mind 'Mutiny Up My Sleeve' era Max Webster.

Life Of A Working Girl, for example, appears to be Chris Murphy's nod to/update of Wings' Another Day. The songs themselves are often wistful, thoughtful, occasionally outright melancholy and frequently seem to say, without saying it explicitly, 'born ten or fifteen years too late.' All in their mid-to-late 30s now, the songwriting has matured. The influences aren't any less obvious, though their nods are more circumspect -- one song from one of the earlier albums, I believe it's one of Pentland's, nicked a guitar riff straight out of Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion; another, who knows whose (some albums credit individual songwriters, others credit the band on all songs), uses the guitar stings from the Beatles' Getting Better. The songs these little steals appear in sound nothing like the songs they're cribbed from, really, but show a vocabulary of mainstream rock, British Invasion pop and other sources.

Which takes me back to what I said about Rick Nielsen -- like starlings, Sloan like to pick up shiny bits and weave them into something larger, or at least structurally more diverse.

Kind of makes me wonder if, ten years from now, some kids who liked Sloan will come along and their peers will think they invented those Badfinger riffs the band they're sending up took from Cheap Trick, who steeped them out of the originals. Probably.